Adventurously commissioned from an untested Florida architect just embarking on a national career, the arts center was Rudolph's first executed large project and a notable experiment in style. In details paraphrased from Collegiate Gothic, as well as in siting, materials, and scale, the exterior design constitutes an early, unusually explicit, and refined adaptation of modernism to a revivalist context. The red brick building originally housed the college's art museum along with facilities for the academic departments of art, music, and theater. The most unusual feature of the interior is the former sculpture court, an airy elaborated mezzanine space branching off the cantilevered staircase in the art wing.